Deadline: December 31st 2013
Payment: Pays 3c per word to a maximum of $150 for short stories, and up to $300 for a novella.

 

Midnight Echo will be accepting submissions for Issue 11 from September 1 through to December 31.

 

What does SINISTER mean to you?

Is it a character; a shadowy, nightmare figure? Or is it an atmosphere; a foreboding air of doom? Does the word fill you with apprehension, or maybe excitement? Or is the vision in your head something we cannot begin to imagine?

Kaaron Warren, our guest editor for Midnight Echo Issue 11, wants to know. She is open to any interpretation of the theme in any style, but she wants to hear original voices. Take a chance. Send us the story you’ve always wanted to write, but were too afraid to tell.

There is a lot of freedom in this theme, which makes it both liberating and terrifying. The editor wants to be moved, surprised and impressed – why don’t you take that as a challenge?

Sinister. Play with it. Enjoy it. Scare us.
About the editor: Shirley Jackson Award winning author Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and four short-story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards, an Aurealis Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies.

She was short-listed for a Bram Stoker Award for All You Can Do Is Breathe, and was Special Guest at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Canberra 2013.

Kaaron will teach a workshop at next year’s Aradale Creative Writing Retreat in February.

FICTION

The maximum word length for short stories is 5000 words. However, the editors may accept one novelette up to 10,000 word per issue (please send us a brief synopsis of your novelette first, and only send the novelette if/when we ask for it).

PLEASE NOTE: if your story exceeds our word limit and you haven’t contacted us first to check that this is okay, we will feed it to our goblins without reading it.

Follow these guidelines when submitting to us:

• Please put your full contact details on the first page of the manuscript.
• Standard submission format, with minimal document formatting.
• Courier or Times New Roman; 12pt; italics as they will appear. No underlining.
• Double spaced.
• Australian English spelling.
• DO NOT use tab or spacing to indent lines. Use ‘styles’ only.
• Please put full contact details on the first page of the manuscript.

For a guide to standard submission format, seehttp://www.shunn.net/format/story.html.

The only variation to this format is that italics MUST appear as they will be used; no underlining.

Stories that fail to follow these requirements will be deleted without being read, so please don’t ruin your chances.

Submissions should be sent as an attachment via email as either an MS Word document or an RTF file.

Write MIDNIGHT ECHO: “Submission Title” in the subject line of the email.

Please include your full contact details (postal address, e-mail, phone number) as well as word count in the body of your email, and send your submission to:

[email protected]

Midnight Echo buys Exclusive Worldwide English Language Rights (no reprints), with 6 month exclusivity after first publication, and pays 3c per word to a maximum of $150 for short stories, and up to $300 for a novella. No simultaneous or multiple submissions please, and no reprints. While we will seek to emphasise the work of Australian writers, Midnight Echo is open to submissions from anyone, anywhere. You do not need to a member of the AHWA to submit your work.

Via: Midnight Echo.